“… put up with his farts and smelly underwear and the toilet with the urine stains all the way to the floor, and then to accompany him to a public soiree where he is so charming, so delightful. Do women really not know that underneath all that charm a man is farts and stains? Why do we fall for it, again and again?”

I’d heard Matthew laugh; his toilet was pristine.

First of all, we weren’t living together, so I couldn’t understand why she was having to put up with my smelly underwear et al. as if we were. Second, was she really talking about me? In a way, I hoped so. I didn’t know I possessed charm. I would like to, even for a few facetious moments at a public soiree. Third, public soiree? What the hell was that? Ergo, was she talking about me? Fourth, I didn’t fart as much as Matthew; I washed my underwear more often than she washed hers; I confess to the crusty commode. Ergo, it would have made sense if instead she’d said, “… put up with his finicky taste buds (no food is as good as my mother’s), his restless sleep (whenever I returned to bed after a walk, she claimed I woke her up), the toilet with the stains (yes yes), and then to have him accompany me to monologues by my father, who is so charming, so delightful …”

I felt a blade at my stomach. I was very far from the baths, drenched, and there was this man who must have been born of the opal rain, moving swiftly to wedge a knife under my windbreaker and through my shirt, just left of my navel. I wondered if I was being punished for having petty thoughts. Or punished for taking the photographs. Or just fucking punished.

“What do you want?” I heard a rasp exit my throat.

He was shorter than me and of paler complexion. High cheekbones, very obtrusive chin. Though this section of the road — definitely not the Great Highway, so where the hell was I? — was too dark to be sure, there could have been gray in the chin.

He could have been anyone.

He stared at me for a long time, and his breath was acrid, a mix of stale white wine and an illness, a stomach illness, perhaps, or a mental one. He gave me a lopsided grin and I could hear the sea. It had stopped raining. I was far from my apartment.

“What do you want?” I repeated. His knife poked harder into my flesh; still he did not reply. There was drool on his lips and he seemed to be shaking, with cold, or with laughter. I told myself the dampness at my belly was my soaked shirt. I wasn’t walking, or running, I was standing still, still as a dried urine stain. Yet I was drifting, as though bewitched, and the air was a checkerboard of moving points, flashes of color darting by.

His fist suddenly jerked to indicate my windbreaker.

“Jacket?” I asked. The knife was no longer at my belly. There was a sharp pain instead. He threw me a ghoulish grin.

In the wind my jacket inflated like a pneumatic device, as if I were blowing it with a rubber tube in a desperate attempt to escape on a solo flight across the Pacific. It would save me. It would save me, but only if I took it off. I began to undress slowly.

He was wheezing. I could hear words behind the wheeze. “Jack-eet. Jack-eet. Gee-ve-me-your-jack-eet.” They were not words but sounds merging into one roll, one hymn. While he repeated this hymn, I freed one arm and then the next, realizing, too late, that my wallet and my keys were in the jacket pocket. He began to hop; I saw Farhana hopping earlier that day. When my jacket was off he began to skip — away. And then he bolted across the street.

This was worse. He hadn’t taken a thing. He’d double back, follow me home.

I pressed my stomach and my fingers came away sticky. I was bleeding. I did not put the jacket back on but I did remove my wallet and keys. I held the jacket out to him as I crept away.

I must have walked south from Balboa, not north, because I could see the silhouette of the Dutch windmill when I looked over my shoulder for him; there it loomed, at the corner of Golden Gate Park. It was the first time my legs had misled me. He’d disappeared under the bridge, toward the park. I heard hushed footsteps but saw no chin, no gray sweats, and no soiled, thick-soled joggers without laces on the left foot. I only knew I’d been staring at the shoes when I searched for them on my way home.

I don’t remember entering my apartment. I remember smearing my stomach with an antibiotic cream from Matthew’s medicine cabinet (above his pristine toilet), bandaging it, taking two Tylenol, and climbing under the blankets with an icepack, naked and shivering. Farhana didn’t stir, didn’t curl into me.

It was still dark when I woke up again, bleeding. Beside me sat a friend of Farhana’s. His name was Wesley.

Eyes Are Heavy

My parents first saw themselves as a married couple in a mirror. It was considered bad luck to gaze directly into each other’s eyes. This was an invitation to a jinn. But it was good luck to gaze at each other’s reflection. And so, at the wedding, my mother’s sister held a mirror across my mother’s lap and the newlyweds looked down, and, according to my aunt, smiled. “Your mother made a coy attempt at covering her lips so your father could not see how broadly she smiled, though of course, she was sitting next to him. He could hear the smile. And she could hear his.”

The same was true for the slopes of Malika Parbat, Queen of the Mountains. Her lovers were not meant to gaze at her directly. We were meant to gaze at her in the lake.

By the time we crossed the glacier and arrived on the banks of Lake Saiful Maluk, Malika Parbat’s reflection was being admired and broken by a stream of exhausted pilgrims and a dozen boats. Irfan warned Wes and Farhana to avoid the boats, declaring, simply, “They sink.”

It was Malika Parbat’s snowmelt that created the lake that reflected her. Her melt, tossed in with that of the surrounding mountains. If you let your imagination soar, far in the distance to the northwest of the Queen appeared a tiny fragment of what might have been the most photographed and feared peak in the Himalayan chain: Nanga Parbat. Naked Mountain. Or perhaps it was just some mystery mountain that only looked like him, for he was too far away to actually be seen from here. Whoever he was, by all accounts, he rarely showed himself as clearly as on that day. Even those who negotiated the lake’s treacherously deep and icy waters in creaky boats to better gaze upon the reflection of the Queen now lifted their chins to gawk across the cerulean sky at that phantom peak, who was her rival, or darling, depending on whom you asked.

Irfan stared in disbelief. “I’ve never seen him. It isn’t possible.”

“This is fairy lake,” I said.

“—Though I’ve heard it can happen,” continued Irfan, still staring, open-mouthed.

Apparently, people believed that on days when the mountain appeared — the one that only looked like Nanga Parbat, but could not have been — the Queen’s snow melted even faster, due either to her rage at having her beauty overshadowed, or her excitement at beholding her lover. And on such days his snow also melted faster, due either to his rage at having his beauty uncloaked — whose eyes were worthy enough? — or his triumph at beholding the Queen’s ferment. Whatever the reason, the lake that day had a strong tide. We could see it from the way the water rolled onto shore; we could have been by the sea.

“I’ve never seen it so rough,” said Irfan, now even more perplexed.

“Maybe the jinn is here,” said Farhana.

“He’s jealous of the love I have for my princess,” I murmured.

“Then step back!”

“But first, look at yourself.” I pulled her closer to the water’s edge.

She was flushed from the hike and her cheeks were as crimson as her jacket. Her hair framed her face in a wild halo of black frizz and her smile was especially radiant. I pulled her, and though our socks and shoes would remain wet for the rest of the day, we waded in further so she could see how lovely she was, and so we could see each other’s reflection in the mirror.

I didn’t know if I was imagining it but at that moment, the water was exceptionally calm. The tide seemed to wait. The lake lay flat as a puddle, and when Farhana craned her neck, the picture that answered back was of a girl as clear and unharried as the water itself, and of a boy beside her, bewitched.

“The jinn isn’t here,” I whispered. “The mountains are making deep, quiet love.”

I would have kissed her then, except it would have offended those around me. It seemed so unjust, the land could express its love but we could not. Later, I thought, gazing at her in the lake.

I caught a slight frown fleet across her reflection before she gave me a smile half of pity, half of promise. In the icy depths below, the Queen’s twin peaks fanned into triangular wings, enclosing us in a jagged cape of blessings. We stored her consent and pulled ourselves back to shore. Behind me, I heard the tide roll again.

Irfan was greeting the semi-nomadic tribes who made their summer homes on the lake’s shores. He spoke in a language I didn’t know, but I also heard some Urdu. I could tell that a lot of their communication involved names: names of those who’d moved to these heights for the summer and those who were staying down in the plains. They’d come with their cattle, horses, and sheepdogs. I spotted a few goats near the lake and several more on the hills to the north. Around us, goat bells chimed. There was a young child in a magenta kameez and a green satin shalwar brandishing a stick, while following a small black goat up a hill and there were half a dozen tourists following her, photographing her. She walked confidently, scratching her head, looking back and grinning. Her hair was the light tawny-blonde shade common to people of the valley, and it was so knotted it didn’t hang over her neck so much as rise from it, as if in the process of becoming dust. Her cheek was stained with dirt; front teeth were missing. I could hear a wet, rattling cough. Around her neck were heavy necklaces and her wrists were encased in even heavier bracelets. The older women must have been inside the tents.